Recent Work on Gender and Empire

All of these books take up in some manner the theme of gender relations in the British empire, but they do so in divergent ways and create correspondingly divergent accounts of what that theme can tell us. Lisa Chilton and Nancy Stockdale take women as their subject: British women and to a limited extent Palestinian women in Stockdale's case. By contrast, Angela Woollacott's focus is on gender, and she makes a point of applying it to a wide range of women as well as to men and boys, all as actors as well as subjects. Antoinette Burton focuses on an individual woman, Santha Rama Rau, but her subject's femaleness is just one of many factors that make Rama Rau an exemplar of "Cold War cosmopolitanism" (4). In the volume of essays edited by Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose, as with Burton, women and gender are two of many issues on the table; in half of the essays, they are not issues at all. Finally, Janice Boddy has written a history of colonial Sudan from which stories of gender emerge.

Let me turn first to the monographs on women's history by Chilton and Stockdale. Each has written a carefully argued monograph on a well-defined subject. Chilton seeks to reveal the identities and motivations of "emigrators" (their own term), that is, clubwomen who organized mostly working-class women's emigration as servants from Britain to Canada and Australia from the 1860s into the interwar period. She shows that these emigrators strove to increase female emigration, exclude women they saw as less-than-respectable from the pool of emigrants, and make emigration more safe (9). Chilton stresses that these emigrators believed that only women could successfully implement these changes, and concludes that the emigrators were successful in their aims and in fact did exert "authority and power" (11). As was typical of so much of Euro-American middle-class women's social activism, these emigrators gained prestige by establishing themselves as the arbiters over other women's lives. They moreover promoted a conception of Canadian and Australian societies as white and British, by ignoring in their publicity work the indigenous and settler women and men of various non-British origins who populated Canada and Australia. Chilton contextualizes the emigrators' activism in labor-market and political controversies at the emigrants' destinations. In chapter 5 she examines the controversies surrounding local clubwomen's attempts to use their insider knowledge to secure newly-arrived domestic servants for themselves before the latter could enter the general labor market. Chapter 6 explores the role of imported British servants in establishing the new Australian capital of Canberra that was to be a showcase for local Australian labor. Chilton follows the emigrators' work over about seventy years, and so can show changes over time; above all, the clubwomen's success had the ironic outcome that after the First World War the state took over the emigrators' now well-recognized work.

Nancy Stockdale surveys an even longer period of time in her book on "colonial encounters" between British and Palestinian women between 1800 and 1948. Unlike Chilton's book, this book gives the reader little sense of any change over time, and that seems to...